Viewingdale

[wayne57]

Is viewingdale software still avalible?
I tried to purchase one off of the web site
but the link didnt work. i wrote an email
to the company but havent recieved a reply yet.

thanks

wayne

[Korash]

I assume that it is, but the author (Redrobes) should be able to answer that question better than I. I will ask him for you.

[wayne57]

thank you for reading my post
and thanks for the help

Wayne57

[Redrobes]

Hi there Wayne, Thanks for the interest in ViewingDale. Normally that email should work and a couple of test emails have come through from me to that address but I know that globally, email is finicky. I did check the purchase button and its true that it redirects to a blank page so it appears that paypal has broken it. Probably the best option right now is to make a few more posts here at the guild till you have 5 then you can private message me and I can sort you out a copy.

[wayne57]

thank you for the reply
i will post a few more times then
contact you regarding the software.

thanks

wayne

[Redrobes]

One more post to reply to this one then your good to go....

The app sales has been waning on the PC since its about 8 years old now. I do plan on getting a linux version of it going. Most probably on the Raspberry Pi and maybe sold on the SD card you plug in. Then it should boot it into the app all set up and ready to go - all configured etc. Thats a lot less stress in the support compared to PCs where there is great variance between each one. The nice thing about the RasPi is that its cheap and has low power. So you should be able to leave it on running 24/7/365 as a server and request a view of the map from it as and when. Then you could host a campaign map on there and have it live for editing. Thats closer to the original vision that I had for the app than the current version unless you can stand leaving a PC / laptop on all year. Its unlikely to be ported to Android or whatever tho.

[Jaxilon]

Raspberry Pi FTW!
That's awesome RR. I think the Raspberry Pi is cool but haven't been able to come up with a reason to buy one yet....although I've been thinking about it.

[Redrobes]

Personally I want one in my car hooked up to a GPS so I can make a street atlas kind of thing except that I am interested in castles, long barrows, stupid roman remains and slight ditches in a field - most of which are not on the standard car GPS kit auto routes. I was hoping to use OpenStreetMaps and then I can also add on all my own personal photos, text and places of interest etc. The raspi runs on about 3W or 600mA at 5V which would be about 250mA of 12V car battery power which is not a lot. Add to that the USB GPS unit of about 50mA and thats no problem. You would also need some kind of small screen like a 6" LCD which is a few hundred mA too but its all no problem. Less than a stereo. You could also hook in loads of MP3's etc as well since it has the capability of being a nice media player anyway. Its small enough to be modded into the car somewhere like the glove box and take power from a standard cigarette socket.

What the raspi seems to be missing (at least when I looked and that was only briefly) was SDL2.0. Incidentally that has been in beta for ages but it was announced today that it was the first release of that. So when there is a useable raspi port of SDL2 then its pretty much good to go. I have already had the dice app running under linux using the SDL2 beta and opengl 1 but raspi has no opengl (ES) 1 only opengl ES2 so there will need to be a far bit of porting to be done. But nothing should prevent it working. Since VDale works off of the GPU mainly and the raspi has a stellar GPU then it should run pretty good !. But we will only know for sure when it runs - the cpu is slow it has to be said and it may yet be too slow. But when it first came out it was 256Mb and that was a close call. Now they are all 512Mb so that gives an adequate amount of head room to code it into. My PC version only uses about 120Mb for the app and the raspi needs to allocate 128Mb for the GPU (unlike PC's, it shares the video memory) so it should be a perfect little card to run it on. Since the whole OS runs from an SD card and its naturally an SSD hard drive, then the loading of the icons should be super fast. This was the slowest part on the PC.

The limiting factor to all of this is my time which still gets eaten away ! But I still plan to do it at some point and ill post about it here when I do.

[Jaxilon]

Sounds like a lot of fun.